The Promise of the Day
by Mickleditch
Summary: Young Merry and Pip. Summer invokes wanderlust in hobbits so inclined. Could be Merry x Pippin pre-slash if you squint.


Disclaimer: The Lord of the Rings and all of its characters belong to the estate of J R R Tolkien.

"Merry, where do you suppose that road goes?"

Tucked into the hawthorn, Merry cracked one eye open, with some effort. It was a hot afternoon, heat in which everything got sleepy and slowed down, and slowed you down along with it, and he was just - _just_ - in that wonderfully still place between slumber and wakefulness, where sounds came, but drifted over you without disruption, like a stream over rounded pebbles. His aunt Eglantine, battling pink-cheeked against it in overseeing, amongst a dozen other things, the baking of a most enormous treacle sponge which the cook swore she could hear collapsing in the oven, had eventually thrown her apron over her head, and asked Merry to make himself useful and please take Pippin out from under her feet for just a little while, upon which Pippin himself had reminded Merry that last time he came visiting at the Smials he had promised to take him fishing for sticklebacks. Pippin had tired of the activity before Merry did, but not before falling into the stream several times, once accidentally, and the rest, Merry suspected, on purpose.

Now he looked, squinting a little against the intermittent glare through the leaves, to where Pippin was sitting in the grass on the verge. His cousin's knees were drawn up tight before him and his chin rested on them, one arm wrapped around his calves and the free hand playing distractedly with his toes. "You know where it goes, to Pincup. You've been there."

"Oh, I know all about Pincup!" Pippin tossed his head with ten year old impatience. Having been back and forth to Buckland several times, he considered himself to be a very well-travelled hobbit these days, and the little market village with its previous fascinations of pastry house, the carpenter who magically turned spare cuts of wood into spinning tops and stick horses, and, once a year, the hiring fair, was now derided as all rot and as dull as dishwater. "I mean _past_ that!" he insisted.

"Longbottom, then the bridge at Sarn Ford, and then places only a Took would get it into their head to start worrying over."

"You don't mean that; I know you don't. And you're half Took too, so you needn't pretend that you don't think about it sometimes." Pippin, unfolding himself, nevertheless rose from his spot and retired a few paces back to the hedge, where there seemed to be less of a risk of being swept up by the brisk, resolute tramp of the road and carried off to distant mountains and bustling cities, only heard about vaguely from travelling merchants and various eccentric and ostracized uncles.

Flopping down practically on top of his cousin, who, now reluctantly and fully awake, complained violently, he stared out to where the winding serpent of it reached the horizon and merged with dim hills and the pale haze of the summer sky. Despite being well in possession of that un-hobbitish thing known as an imagination, he wasn't so naive as to imagine that a person might actually look along the road one day and, instead of the butcher's cart, see the banners of elves fluttering in the breeze, and a caravan of oliphaunts and all manner of other strange, wonderful and terrible things, but he was still of the opinion that if any of these were to pay a visit to the Shire, this would be the best place to wait for them.

"Merry?" he asked.

"What? And don't _sit_ on me!"

"You feel nice, and your stomach's softer than the grass. I shall sit on you all I want." Pippin, for his own part, was still rather small and scrawny for his age, despite having managed to invent third breakfast, which consisted of any second breakfast that the rightful owner failed to keep a sufficient watch over. "Merry?" he said again, more distractedly this time. "Do you think that we'll ever see any of those places?"

Merry opened his mouth to start to say that he didn't care all that much, then stopped because that wasn't altogether true, even if he had more pressing concerns most of the time. It had surfaced early in Pippin, he thought, like he'd heard (darkly, from aunts) it had in Frodo, and it might be that it would be later in him. Merry considered himself to be an astute sort of hobbit, more given to practical plans than daydreams and books brought from faraway and strange words from even further, but now and then, on days like this, it had woken in him, even in Buckland. The dry waterways and ditches he knew so well were suddenly overly familiar, the swathes of pink campion and purple ladysmock crowning the riverbank not quite so bright as usual and the reed-talk not quite so musical, and he had found himself watching the ale-brown water rushing away to who knew where, or staring at the Hay Gate, and thinking that perhaps it was in him too to be a wanderer; nothing specific arranged yet, but a definite possibility.

He reached up, and ruffled Pippin's hair. "Cheer up," he said. "Maybe you'll build a ship one day, and sail it down the Brandywine and out to sea. It's happened before, after all."

Pippin considered this. "Will you come with me?"

"I might. If you want me to."

"Even if we're both as old as the Old Took?"

"Even if," Merry replied, and then smiled at his cousin's expression, so deeply thoughtful that it was comical on his small, freckled countenance. "Or maybe Gandalf will have come before then, like he did for Bilbo, and taken you away on an adventure."

It was as if a cloud scudded over then, and the air, previously so pleasant, had suddenly taken on an unexpected chill. The words _taken you away_ seemed to have an echoing quality that lingered in Merry's ears after he had spoken them, and, in his lap, Pippin shivered until his teeth chattered in his head. It was a peculiar, frightening thing, that faded into nothingness almost as soon as it had appeared. Then the sky brightened again, the scent of grass and clover came back to him on the breeze, and he was left wondering, and with the distinct feeling that something had passed very close by to them and been only temporarily avoided. Pippin clearly shared this, as he asked, abruptly,

"I shan't have to go _too_ soon, though, shall I? It's only that - there's an awful lot that I want to do first, and I suppose that I really _ought_ to try being the Thain, even if it's just for a little while."

"And I ought to be the Master of Buckland. For a few years, anyway."

"But one day, a very long time from now?" Pippin enquired, cautiously.

"One day," Merry agreed, and duly accepted Pippin's solemn handshake on the matter. And as his cousin clambered off him, and settled somewhere near the crook of his knees to begin a diligent hunt for the most fearsome beetles he could find in the grass, excursions forgotten with youthful speed for the moment, Merry allowed himself, in his mind, to journey a little way along the road. One summer morning, he thought, he would cut himself a good hazel stick, and he and Pippin, and Frodo, and probably Sam hurrying behind, unwilling to let Frodo get too far out of his sight for too long a time, would go tramping along it, or another very much like it. They would pass the cows bellowing softly in the meadows, and the golden seas of corn, and reach the river where they would stop to exchange a few friendly words, and, in all likelihood, a bottle or two of beer with the tradesmen among the shouts and the earthy apple smell of the mud and the creaking of barges in the water. From there it would take no more than a few steps, and they would be on their way. To where, exactly, Merry didn't feel as if he were altogether sure yet, but that would be something to be decided between themselves as they went. For hobbits, especially Tooks, a straightforward task. 


End file.
